Your Car is Being Watched

9/28/2012 10:30PM

Police forces and private companies are scanning auto license plates and building huge databases of location information--whether or not the owners of the cars have done anything wrong. WSJ's Julia Angwin reports.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

... I ... then ... you are being watched ... after a license plate ... sixteen mph ... this car is capable of taking pictures of thousands of license plates Lynch ... then the track system has a four camera lights and the connection was down ... two more ... I captured her ... I mean traveling parallel ... and ... the rear cameras are going to get ... your opinion ... the call ... each plate and the track Reeves also captures the date time stamp and GPS equipment CA ... and then that information is fed back to the company's central database ... and the Czech releases its technology to repossession is ... a music to repossessed vehicles from honors fallen behind in the team ... the best thing is all around ... as demand and that more than one certified us we would have ... to act as hell and get up and collect on the part I think ... that the police are also building huge databases of the of the location information ... whether or not the owners of the cars in question is anything wrong ... the thing that bothers me about the most ... is that most of the red in the database are as innocent diesel ... when my tax cutting found out the police and his ... family and California for using licensed previous years ... he used the California public Records Act to find out what they had on his two cops ... might be able to photograph to more than a hundred times ... each of those times ... aam you know with a date and time stamp of course the location data ... and that information is being store in death only there is no indication they were ever Guinea get with it ... this is the thing I found um most troubling about it was that at least in one of the photos my children are recognizable ... in time when they're getting out of the car ... in seven innings it was captured by this automated license plates Canada smell run-up lease car as it was driving by my house I'm in my driveway ... I mean we're just getting out a card you can identify both of my two daughters ... that leaves even family and then that the data is only in a news ... conference call ... and they're running on ... a man ... is undeniable and not injured ... in past local police departments wouldn't have bothered to shoot in store pictures of cars they have no reason to suspect ... but cheap access to powerful technology is changing all that ... it costs less than two bucks the year to store a gigabyte of information ... that's down from nineteen dollars and two thousand ... soo now even a relatively small police force can put together a database with millions of fleet numbers ... and they're not the only ones ... there are millions and millions per day ... their gender ... we stopped filling these milestones out because they were entered into a ... sleek style ... will change ... once we hit ... hundred million in just ... scotch accidents and twenty three years as a repossession agent ... now he analytics meant to run and the attacking Palin teen Illinois just outside of Chicago ... it's one of two companies in the U S marketing the technology for private use ... he got a license plate ... that stores the information ... you can easily pull the ... person's name he can pull it around rooster he'll be ... carefully in that stuff up with the school including what it does is it matches ... so we don't move ... the hot list of one vehicles for repossession ... within milliseconds with Graham license please get in action ... repossession agents pay a monthly fee to use the camera to get an alert when a span of three under par wanted for repossession ... the the ... the the the ... every one of those standards include the vehicles that are not wanted for anything ... goes back into antitax database ... they even have my are ... not here on the New York City ... I gave them the track permission to let that idea on their day ... we ran a search ... in ... we are a result we saw this vehicle ... at seven eleven ... in the morning in forty nine seconds ... and several others in two thousand eleven ... and I was last seen at that latitude and longitude ... and that report is stored on the back end server ... after prom for California State Senator Joe sanity and ... I don't think we want either the private sector or the public sector ... collecting data about the movement of law abiding citizens keeping in perpetuity and then sharing it with anyone who wants to write a check ... right now ... all that's entirely within the law ... Center City and Aston unveiled earlier this year that would limit the amount of time private contractor could hold on to D ... and require least have to get search warrants access ... my hope was this a good week purge the information for some reasonable period of time ... can we make sure that long Forstmann is accessing the information ... they have more they have some reasonable basis on probable cause to ask for the information ... the bill was eventually scrapped faced with opposition from companies that can be tapped him on course ... NetApp said it had no intention of selling the the the the third party marketing ... heaven and on the main information crackdown that that's ... not to invade the privacy of law binding ... cold comfort for people like my cats having ... one vehicle was stolen I had committed no crime there is no war no my rest you get the police service basically ... establishing a database of my location as determined by this automated license plates him ... it's a case where ... big brother has come into effect ... the Wall Street Journal this is Julie angling in your ... I ...